Archive for category: Observations

David Hornik wrote a good piece, “Built to be Bought (Bubble 2.0)” which warns that the large volume of companies being started w/ the express purpose of getting acquired is a strikingly similar trait to what was going on right before Bubble 1.0.

As you may know, I advocate the IP licensing model for Hawaii startups which means that you build up a good product, generate revenue, and then partner with a company that has sufficient resources to really take your idea/product to the next level. You might also get lucky and get acquired which is what happened to my company TitanKey Software.

David’s post is a good read. I disagree with him in that the goal should be to go IPO because while that may be true in SV, it’s quite the rarity here in Hawaii. However he does help define a fine line between creating a really cool product that can succeed vs. creating a feature that another company might want to acquire.

OK, so you wanna be an entreprenuer. Cool. Can you sell? Your answer better be “Yes!” or “I’m gonna!”.

Simple truth: if you can’t sell, you won’t succeed. Plain and simple. Now, this really strikes most geeks really bad because any good engineer knows that sales is really the art of getting paid to spew bullshit, right? There’s nothing a geek quite hates as much as marketing people or sales people.

But at the end of the day, you, Mr/s Geek-prenuer, are going to have to sell. You’ll need to sell yourself, your product, your idea, and hopefully, finally, your company.

If you’re having a hard time swallowing that you’re going to need to be one of those bullshitters, let me give you something to think about: True salesmanship is an engineering exercise whereby the salesperson’s job is to fully understand the customer’s need and then engineer a solution using products and services supplied by the company. Once you understand that the very best sales are done as a full-on engineering exercise, it all becomes quite easy to do. But you’ll still have to shower.

Here’s a Forbes article, “Sales Lessons For Tongue-Tied Techies” that’s good food for thought.

Here’s a great article that really supports my position that we can stay microscopically small here in Hawaii yet belt out really successful companies.

I had the honor and pleasure of meeting Paul Graham a few years ago when I presented Titan Key at MIT.

Since then he’s started a different kind of venture capital firm, “Y Combinator” . And I think he’s got some very good ideas that can apply here in Hawaii as well.

One really, really neat thing they did was to fund a collection of founders during summer break. The idea was that they would spend the summer to develop a prototype and then go for funding at the end. The results were pretty impressive. I think we can do this in Hawaii.

Apparently their summer efforts were so successful they are going to do it again in the winter. Here’s some details on their program. I think this approach deserves pretty serious consideration.